NEWS: Info on New Orleans Graduation Rates Pre-Katrina
Today I read a May 2014 post, Charter Schools’ Memory Hole, written by Adam Hubbard Johnson.
His piece opens as follows:
Pre-Katrina New Orleans graduation numbers are charter school advocates’ exhibit A for reform. One problem: The U.S. and Louisiana Departments of Education say they don’t exist.
What Johnson attempted to do was track the supposed pre-Katrina New Orleans graduation rate of 54.4% to a primary source by contacting those who have cited this stat, including NOLA.com reporter Danielle Dreilinger and former state board member Leslie Jacobs.
Even the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) communicated to him that they did not have “published graduation rates” that went back that far (Johnson asked for 2002-04).
No primary source available.
Well. I have some graduation data on Orleans Parish pre-Katrina, and it comes from LDOE data.
Here is the process that I followed:
In his post, Johnson noted that the url for the LDOE website has changed five times in the past ten years.
I used the web archive search engine Wayback Machine and plugged in the first of Johnson’s reported LDOE urls. Archived page views went back to 2006.
Not far enough.
So, in an effort to find a document with an older LDOE url on it, I googled the term, “louisiana department of education 2001 pdf.” Sure enough, I came up with doe.state.la.us.
When I plugged that into the Wayback machine, it showed archived LDOE page views going back to November 1996.
Here are some that I saved– and they are a trove of archived data that LDOE cannot erase:
My goal in this search was to find information on Orleans Parish graduation rates in NEWS: Info on New Orleans Graduation Rates Pre-Katrina | deutsch29: